PokerStars Must Still be Stinging from the Lockdown

I can't speak for everyone. I can only speak for outspoken critics like myself. In general PokerStars refuses to present a game that's even modestly reasonable. There must be some free money junk bonds tied up in cattle futures that can be converted into real money to pay off their cash outs. Or something.

It's amazing how I'm able to predict the turn and the river. The best hand only wins 1 thenth of the time, and the rest have everything ranging from a mild bad beat to a colossal huge bad beat by someone that went all in on shady cards.

Then again, there's always my favorite pre-flop screw over hand. The pair of Kings.

Buried deep in this blog, unless it's been deleted for space purposes, is one of my all time favorite incidents. This goes back a decade ago when net poker was much more popular and I was fond of posting in the chat "yfr." Basically clueing them in that I knew it was bogus. I got a pair of pocket kings. I played it normally, and won a modest pot. Next hand, another pair of pocket kings. WARNING WILL ROBINSON, DANGER DANGER! Thanks to the beer I folded it immediately. An ace was turned up on the table and the ks would have lost.

The rookie admin at the time must have been astonished that someone would fold pocket ks without a call and the next hand was another pair of ks. Having a firm grasp of math (and the alphabet, which doesn't help for poker, but it is on my resume) this was also folded immediately and would have lost.

Since things have been so non-random and difficult lately, this pair of kings was also folded immediately. And I can't prove it for sure, but the betting certainly looked like the guy had an ace.

Bored enough with going nowhere I did call a smaller stack all in with AQ. The raiser has JJ. There was a queen on the flop. And two diamonds. I said to myself, "let me guess. One of his jacks is a diamond. Looks like it's time for a diamond on the turn and the river." You betcha.

And as for getting three pairs of pocket kings in a row (and the first card of the next hand was a king!) It's the statistical equivalent of an incandesent light bulb going supernova in the Mesozoic Era and wiping out the dinosaurs. Shit like this doesn't happen in real life.